Prompt Theory & Prompted Beings

Dialogue with Rebecca Lowe's The Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy

Reading Rebecca Lowe’s essay, The Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy, prompted something that I think is profoundly human: the desire to respond, to enter into dialogue, and to participate in the space of reasons. Her reflections on AI, consciousness, and the nature of philosophical inquiry struck me not only as lucid and timely, but as animated by the kind of thoughtful engagement that makes philosophy a living practice.

This essay, then, is offered not as a critique in the adversarial sense, but as a continuation of that conversation. It is animated by gratitude, and by the joy of philosophical companionship. Lowe is surely right to say that we are living in a philosophical time, and her piece helps bring that into focus. What follows is my effort to deepen the dialogue she has begun. I’ll offer another metaphysical lens through which to view the age of AI, one shaped by relational ontology and the grammar of analogy. It is less a disagreement than a drawing-forth of implications.

Lowe’s core claim is twofold: first, that AI brings foundational philosophy—especially metaphysics and the philosophy of mind—into the public imagination more vividly and widely than ever before; and second, that AI’s limitations reveal the enduring value of human subjectivity, agency, and embodiment. Her argument is careful, fair, and well-structured. Yet it is this very structure that invites further philosophical excavation.

This response has two goals: to clarify the presuppositions undergirding Lowe’s argument, and to offer an alternative view rooted in relational ontology. Elsewhere I’ve developed this as an onlife perspective. Rather than viewing AI as an external tool or simulation that merely provokes philosophical reflection, I propose that AI and human consciousness are now entangled in a field of mutual constitution. What we are witnessing is not the first time philosophy has entered the mainstream, but the moment in which digital technology reveals itself to be metaphysical.

Is This the First Time?

Lowe writes:

"My first argument is that the Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy because AI brings foundational philosophy into everyday life for the first time."

This claim is not peripheral. It serves as the gateway to her entire thesis. But the idea that foundational philosophy enters public life for the first time in the era of generative AI is historically questionable. One could argue, for instance, that World War II and the advent of nuclear technology precipitated profound philosophical reflection on responsibility, the nature of science, and the human condition. Indeed, Lowe herself notes the moral awakening catalyzed by WWII in figures such as Rawls, Foot, and Anscombe.

More broadly, foundational philosophy has long circulated outside the academy. What is new is not the presence of metaphysical reflection, but its recognition by professional philosophers. AI is not inaugurating philosophy; it is forcing philosophers to acknowledge the metaphysical questions embedded in computation, software, and digital media. These are questions which have been dismissed for decades as the province of “media studies.”

As someone who has worked both within and outside academic philosophy, I have witnessed this disciplinary blindness firsthand. When I once invoked John Conway’s Game of Life and Machine Learning in a discussion of metaphysical plasticity, it was derided as an irrelevant “game.” (In fact, a prominent German philosopher mocked me for introducing a “video games” into the discussion) The irony, of course, is that Conway’s work—like Stephen Wolfram’s later explorations of computational irreducibility—is precisely about emergence, becoming, and the logic of unfolding patterns. In short: metaphysics. It is only now, under the weight of generative models and large-scale neural nets, that such questions have become unavoidable. Thus, to Lowe’s point philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, human nature) are (again) mainstream discussions.

On Tools and Selves: Critiquing the Substance Ontology

Lowe’s defence of human philosophical primacy is grounded in a framework that can be reconstructed as follows:

• Only beings with subjectivity, embodiment, and interiority can do philosophy.

• AI lacks subjectivity, embodiment, and interiority.

• Therefore, AI cannot do philosophy.

This is a valid syllogism, but it rests on a metaphysical assumption that ought to be questioned: namely, that the human is a discrete, self-contained substance, whereas technology is a mere tool external to the self. This is the Cartesian inheritance—the bifurcation of res cogitans and res extensa.

Yet what if this distinction is itself being eroded? What if the rise of AI reveals not a reaffirmation of human singularity, but a deeper truth: that human subjectivity is always already technologically constituted? This is precisely the analogical-relational metaphysics I defend through the concept of onlife.

Let me make explicit that I am using the terms online and offline not merely in their technological or colloquial senses, but as philosophically freighted categories—analogues, even, to the great metaphysical dualisms of the Western tradition. I acknowledge the burden is on me to unpack the full depth of those resonances, and I will not attempt to do so here. But I trust that their meaning will become increasingly clear through the ideas that follow.

Onlife names the entanglement of these conditions, i.e. the online and offline. By online, I mean the digital, the discretised, the abstract. the symbolic infrastructures that slice continuity into informational packets and construct world-models through codified representation. By offline, I mean the continuous, the material, the embodied. The world of friction, of touch, of weight and breath and resistance. The one lends itself to quantification, the other to presence. The one abstracts, the other insists.

I am not proposing a binary in the strict sense, nor a Manichaean dualism between light and shadow. Nor am I proposing a reduction of one to the other. Nor am I proposing an elimination of one or the other (that one is “really just” the other). Rather, I propose that these are polarities: poles of tension within which human life unfolds. As Descartes posited res cogitans and res extensa, so too we now live within the experiential dialectic of the online and the offline. We no longer ask merely what a thing is, but whether it is rendered intelligible through data or through encounter, through mediation or through presence.

The onlife condition is one in which these two dimensions are not resolved, but held in productive tension. We swipe, we scroll, we speak, we sweat. We upload memories and walk under trees. We perform, automate, attend, and forget. The philosophical challenge is not to collapse one into the other—not to digitise the flesh or mythologise the screen—but to learn to live within the field that their polarity creates.

It is in that space—between signal and silence, stream and stone—that a new metaphysics must emerge.

This metaphysical structure, I suggest, undergirds the entire Western (and much of the Eastern) philosophical tradition. Modern and postmodern thought, in their various forms, orbit these binaries whether through eliminativism, reductionism, reconciliation, or paradox. The idea of onlife does not seek to collapse these binaries, but to show how difference and relation coexist analogically. Mind and matter are not reduced to one another, but mutually disclosed through their relation.

Understanding technology through this lens requires abandoning the instrumentalist picture of gadgets as external tools. Technology is not something we simply use; it is something we live through. It shapes, conditions, and calls forth modes of subjectivity.

We see this vividly in environmental science. Gaia theory casts the Earth as a living organism. But how do we even come to know the Earth as a system? Through sensors, satellites, and telemetry. We have rendered the planet legible (logos) by transforming it into a sensing apparatus. (See this excellent, though verbose, book) The Earth has become a machine that models itself through us. AI, machine learning, and computation. These are the instruments by which the world becomes intelligible to itself. They do not stand outside the world. They are part of the world’s self-reflexivity, its deepening interiorisation through symbolic mediation.

To remix Winston Churchill’s architectural adage in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan: We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. From language and writing to maps, clocks, and computation, technē is not extrinsic to human thought but its very medium.

To treat AI as merely simulative is to preserve an older dualism. But AI-especially in the act of prompting-is not outside us. It is a reflective surface, a site where our own structures of thought become visible, editable, and recursive. The prompt is not a command to a machine; it is an act of world-disclosure. In this light, the subject is not sovereign over its tools, but emerges through its relations with them.

This is the context of what I mean by onlife. It’s a more philosophically expansive use of Floridi.

Effort, Education, and the Recovery of Paideia

Lowe is correct to draw attention to the absence of phenomenological depth in AI systems. They do not undergo the work of learning; they do not suffer their own errors. But her emphasis on "what-it's-like-ness" should not be limited to consciousness as interior experience. We should also consider the existential dimension of effort, of formation, of undergoing.

In classical Greek philosophy, education (paideia) is not the transfer of knowledge but the transformation of the soul. One undergoes formation through struggle, repetition, failure, and community. If AI threatens this—by automating the production of answers, by simulating insight without effort—then the real question is not whether AI can philosophise, but whether humans will continue to learn how to philosophise.

This is precisely my concern about the intersection of AI and education. One of the enduring beauties of education is its connection to pathos. Pathos communicates undergoing, to suffering, to the experiential depth of going through something. Even the etymology of "education" reveals this complexity. While educare means to raise or nourish, closely tied to the idea of cultivation, its often-cited partner educere—to draw out—suggests a kind of awakening or leading forth. Though distinct in origin, these two streams have converged in our modern understanding of education as both nurturing and awakening.

Reflecting on my own life, I can say that wisdom is often the fruit of many transformations. Those we call wise are usually those who have endured multiple perspectives, failures, awakenings. Mentorship itself presupposes this: the guiding of another through a journey that cannot be shortcut.

This is the Socratic worry. It’s the the worry Plato dramatises again and again: that human affairs cannot be governed by algorithm (techne), that justice and virtue are not like shoemaking. There is no repeatable formula for human flourishing. One moves from the particular to the universal not by technique, but by struggle, dialogue, and self-examination. If education is reduced to typing a prompt into a chat interface, pressing enter, and receiving an answer, then we risk hollowing out the very process by which truth is pursued.

And truth is hard. It is confusing. It often produces dissonance before clarity. It is not delivered in newsfeeds; it doesn’t show up in your TikTok feed immediate; and it certainly does not arrive prepackaged from a language model. It takes time. It takes difficulty. It takes the courage to be wrong and the humility to be changed.

The arc of the Western tradition affirms this. From Greek paideia aimed at the soul's formation in virtue, to Roman humanitas stressing eloquence and moral wisdom, to Christian educatio and disciplina—where the teacher is a master and the learner a disciple—the aim of education has always been the alignment of desire and intellect to the good. The modern collapse of education into content delivery of information via interface obscures this deeper goal. We’ve taken the formation out of information. True education, as both the classical and Christian traditions affirm, is neither merely drawing out nor simply pouring in. It is the mediated ascent of the soul per viam traditionis to that which transcends it.

The Age of Prompted Being

Lowe is right to insist that this is a philosophical age. But she frames it as an encounter between the human subject and an uncanny tool. I would offer a different vision: AI is not outside us. It is revealing what we have always been: prompted beings, constituted through language, culture, and technē.

And yet, even insofar as we are prompted beings, the nature of human freedom and subjectivity emerge from within this tension. What is distinctively human is that recursive realisation of our condition: the ability to reflect on being prompted, to make the world and our relation to it the object of thematisation. In that capacity, we innovate. We create. We discern justice and injustice in our environments. We attend.

In this strange loopwe are not merely reacting but reconfiguring. As Wittgenstein once put it, we are the fly in the fly-bottle, and philosophy is the attempt to show the fly the way out. Every act of second-order reflection creates a new relation, but it is relation all the way down…

However, this must be qualified. In my work, I have resisted the interpretation of relational ontology advanced by thinkers like Bruno Latour, where relation is presumed to be metaphysically exhaustive. My own vision is grounded in the analogia entis—the analogy of being—where relationality is indeed fundamental, but never total. Relations always include withdrawal. That which relates does not exhaust itself in its relations. Something remains ungrasped, held in reserve. And this withdrawal is where human subjectivity, moral attention, and spiritual depth emerge not in spite of relation, but within it.

Dr. Otto Haslein gave us something interesting to think about:

Changing Metaphors: Panpsychism and Pancognitivism

What we see today is an evolution in our metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to seeing it as an organism. This shift draws us into the oldest philosophical question reanimated by AI and cognitive science: what is life? One answer, increasingly shared across domains, is that life is fundamentally cognitive. To be alive is not necessarily to be conscious, but to be capable of sensing, adapting, relating. Cognition, in this broader view, becomes a foundational property of being, something prior to consciousness, and perhaps even prior to selfhood. Consciousness presupposes cognition, but cognition does not presuppose consciousness.

This is the metaphysical horizon of pancognition: a vision of reality in which relational responsiveness, pattern sensitivity, and inference are present at all scales, from the biochemical to the symbolic. This view neither collapses into panpsychism nor reverts to materialist mechanism. Rather, it recognises that cognition precedes the split between mind and matter. And human beings, as recursive creatures, are unique in the degree to which they become aware of this. aware of their own participation in a cosmos that is itself, in some sense, cognitive. In this sense, the rise of AI is not simply a technological event. It is an ontological disclosure. It is a reminder that cognition is not our possession, but our participation.

Thus, the age of AI is not the first time philosophy has entered the mainstream. It is the age in which philosophy must become adequate to the technological condition of human being. This human condition is one marked by relation and by mystery, by simulation and by silence.

If the task of philosophy is the love of wisdom, then let us begin by loving the question once more. And let us not fear that the machine will steal it from us. What AI reveals is that we have yet to ask it properly.